Science fiction author, internet activist and uber-blogger, Cory Doctorow, has a piece at internetevolution.com about how we should stop judging new media from an old media framework. Sitcoms seem like they work best in 22-minute (plus commercials) segments because that’s the box that sitcoms fit in, but we shouldn’t infer that all comedies in the video medium must therefore conform to that standard…
Twenty-two-minute sitcoms are highly evolved creatures, as formally bounded as a sonnet. Their highly paid practitioners have an arcane vocabulary and procedure to describe the system by which they are assembled to achieve maximal effect; we, the audience for these shows, have imbibed so many of them that we unconsciously expect the twists and turns the storytellers are delivering, even if we lack a conscious understanding of the formal structure and the specialist jargon needed to describe it.
By contrast, the short Internet video isn’t a single genre — it’s more like cosmic narrative dust hurtling through space, clumping together here and there into larger conglomerates, then splitting apart before stabilizing. There’s no formal structure to the eight-minute teenage-ramble-from-the-bedroom — both the creator and the audience are winging it.
This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2008.
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